25 ms·

You are not late (2014)

313 points by yarapavan 3y ago

d4n0ct 3y ago
A few general observations: While there are still opportunities, perhaps fewer in developed and more in developing countries, the QUALITY of opportunities were different back in the days. The SOFTWARE field was still relatively wide open. The barrier-to-entry was being nerdy smart, but otherwise the costs (basic computers, telephone line access, some education) were low, at least in parts of the USA. Simultaneously the potential return was high. Because the information age was just beginning, and the world was hungry for software. People who were smart with software at that right time could literally shape the coming world. Think Microsoft and Google. In comparison, while the hardware side (chipsets, telecom equipment, etc) has grown, it hasn't "exploded", maybe except CPU or GPU, which are hugely capital intensive. You cannot train AI in your garage yet in a way that differentiates your "product" from that of the big players. The demand for pure software is no longer that high. On the hardware side, barriers to "physical" innovations, such as semiconductors, medicine, etc are still high now as ever. The "low" hanging "soft" fruits have been picked. This now feels more like the big mainframe computer era. So while there are still opportunities, they aren't comparable to the past. When science and technology fundamentally changed in the past, from manual labor to machinery to electronics etc, they opened up new fields for human innovation and endeavors. Groundbreaking disruptions are much rarer now, and the only one, AI, opens up a new field more for computers than for people.
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mysterydip 3y ago
A great reminder, and interestingly prescient given the AI growth in the past couple years.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  Accurate I guess. Amazing given this was a decade ago! > Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. Personally the AI aspect feels like the least compelling aspect of how computing can build in-roads & become genuinely compelling to the world again. Many many many people are on the sprinkle-on-some-AI-and-get-rich path, but it's just incredibly non-contributive to the field, to expanding the frontier to me. Apply deep-learned expert-systems doesn't making computing better on iota, doesn't enhance man machine-symbiosis. I crave a computing era where we can return to the fundamentals. To me, computing's 90's/aughts boom was because we created a democratized access to all the tech, because OSS helped us all learn and grow together. We never had better leverage to augment intellect (the Douglas Engelbart vision/mission) than that, and that made all the difference. It's hard for me to imagine owned proprietary ML spawning lateral growth & understanding, to me.
  - tomrod 3y ago
    > I crave a computing era where we can return to the fundamentals. The core of this comes down to -- will it scale? This is what I want to see from the OS/OW AI models (open source / open weights) universe (kudos to Hugging Face for facilitating this). I suspect the OpenAI model approach, where all infra is hidden and the models are hidden behind services, can't scale to meet the demand of what people want out of AI. Directions like Mamba over hungry compute Transformers, SLM as over expensive LLMs, and so on, will commodify AI services as operational frameworks mature. OpenAI gets that, hence why they are listening to consumer demand, but their moat assumption is faulty. That said, I am optimistic about the future of this technology and others that are currently being mined for breakthroughs.
    - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
      I can see better now that this is a distinct take, but the fundamentals to me were about man-machine symbiosis. About making systems that we understand & can be freer for using. I do think scale is important too. But it's a refinement it feels like, one we've already covered pretty well albeit have to keep re-learning/isn't evenly distributed yet. But making computing that is open & explorable? Go watch an Alan Kay talk, any of them; he'll say what I'm saying: we barely have begun to figure out the actual essence of computing where it opens itself up to us & makes us more potent people. We have been grinding on the same target, without pause for thinking about what general computing systems could be like, and it's the wider view that this is all actually on service of, that will help us. AI to me is mostly creating our own Dark Forest scenario on our own planet that we have to somehow coexist with. More distraction from fundamentals.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I have hope for many more turns / revolutions! Boy have we been in a holding/consolidation pattern. The age of massification has been upon us; getting everyone else online has been the effort, the way to rise. Free online services we can connect to from anywhere has been an amazing change, a totally new expectation that totally changes how computing situates itself in our lives. At much cost to figuring out further places to pioneer, I feel. We need new cycles with new energy, where lots of people are trying stuff out again. Computing & tech should not stay well settled; we should be trying crazy stuff. It feels like a lifetime ago that Tim O'Reilly was preaching "follow the alpha geeks", look for those very capable folks doing excellently for themselves. That ability to trendspot & try lots of things has been somewhat by these huge scales & systems, but I believe a return to personal-ity has to crop up again sometime. We'll find some fertile terrains where new things are a happening again. 2014 was when thing were actually really setting in place, when the pioneering stage was really giving way to some settlers (and town planners, see: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...). There's a lot of roughness, but tech getting it's mojo back may be not far off. It's a challenge though; the reality of creating ever-connected ever-online systems is hard. We have amazing amounts of server we can fit in a pizza box, at incredibly low $/performance, but we're unpracticed at doing it without pain at smaller scales, by ourselves, anew. Trying to create new generative platforms, that serve as a basis to let more value spring up: it needs a strong foundation, so that it can keep "creating more value than it captures," another O'Reilly-ism. The future is (with hope) exciting!
coffeebeqn 3y ago
They already figured out bronze that you can build anything you can imagine out of. Why would I put any more effort into metallurgy ?
- amelius 3y ago
  The other day I was trying to forge a lock but then the guy showed up who gave me the iron ore, asking for 30% of my revenue ...
JohnMakin 3y ago
This fun thought only holds true if the internet is not in decline. in 2014, which very arguably was peak internet, I could understand not thinking that, but today, I struggle to imagine how this isn’t the case.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  Peak internet was 2015, before the 2016 internet rupture when the digital space become pop culture and cyberspace inverted into the real.
WD-42 3y ago
Not to seem pessimistic, but in the 10 years since this article what have we really gained on the internet that we didn’t have then? Seems like we got a lot more social media and some failed promises from crypto. This is barring the current ai stuff since it’s still really shaking out.
- muzani 3y ago
  There was the mobile and cloud boom. Which resulted in more digital payments (more difficult for crime and corruption), online to offline stuff like ride sharing and e-commerce. Plus a ton of advancements on logistics, especially in developing countries. I think most of these changes didn't affect developed nations so much, it's probably still good old Walmart and Amazon. But they were lifechanging to developing nations. We had some advancements in the rights of factory workers as they had to match gig workers, and crime dropped drastically in some places because it just wasn't worth it anymore when you could climb out of poverty by delivering food.
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    mobile and cloud was well alive and booming a decade before 2014 (i guess you could very technically argue not cloud but S3 buckets on aws caught fire almost instantaneously)
    - dasil003 3y ago
      S3 didn't launch until 2006, iPhone 2007, App Store 2008. In 2004 we had Palms and VPSs, but that doesn't quality as mobile and cloud in any modern sense of the word.
      - JohnMakin 3y ago
        so I’ll hope you’ll forgive me 2 years then on my “decade” statement which was not meant as literally as you took it. There were mobile phones before the iphone. Like a whole ecosystem even! They even had screens! and browsers! and internet! the major innovation the iphone brought was a touch screen (and a decent camera), which sort of existed, but nothing as smooth and crisp as the iphone. please i really hope people out there dont think the iphone was the invention of the cell phone.
dougmwne 3y ago
I feel like the last 10 years have been a maturing phase. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for young upstarts without funding. It seemed like it was the era of big money innovation, burning mountains of cash trying to stake the last few open claims on the app and web ecosystem. And there was the crypto stuff, yuck, many went to prison. But the real revolution is AI. Thinking back to 2014 and peering forward, it’s unfathomable. If there had been a sci-fi movie, I would have thought it unrealistic. I still think I have no idea where this will take is or how much our industry will change. What a great time to be an entrepreneur.
- ildjarn 3y ago
  Her came out in 2013, so there kind of was a movie.
  - dougmwne 3y ago
    Oh that’s true. She was a most excellent chatbot. But I don’t recall her making images, movies or composing music. I recall that movie seemed cute but probably technologically impossible. Now it’s reality for many users of AI girlfriends.
    - ciroduran 3y ago
      In the movie she makes up the lyrics of a song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxahbnUCZxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxahbnUCZxY
DoreenMichele 3y ago
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today. I don't know why anyone would sit around moping about "If only this were thirty years ago!" If it seems like your idea would be "easy" or something -- if only it were thirty years ago -- then most likely it's because we are where we are and you know what you know now that you wouldn't have known then. It's like all the people who say things like "Youth is wasted on the young" and "I wish I had known what I know now back when I was seventeen." Yeah, you know it at all because you aren't seventeen.
- santoshalper 3y ago
  I do, because figuring out what is going to be big 30 years from now is hard (arguably impossible to do deterministically), but knowing what is big now is easy, and wishing you could go back and capitalize on that is natural.
  - lostemptations5 3y ago
    But not useful-- so that's why planting the "tree" now is more practical
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    A lot of people also spend scads of time contemplating how they would spend the money if they won the lottery and it's generally a waste of time. They probably aren't going to win the lottery and it usually isn't used as a stepping stone to making real life decisions about, say, what kind of career they want to pursue or how they wish to spend their retirement. I used to do that sort of thing and then began going "If I value x, why sit around telling myself I can't possibly have that or some piece of that without winning the lottery? Why not do what I can to actually work towards that to some degree, in some fashion?" So you may get it. That's fine. I don't and that's not commentary on anyone but me and how my mind works.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  If this were thirty years ago instead of today, the opportunity to build X[1] would be wide open, but you'd have to build it with the tools that were available 30 years ago. That might not be nearly as easy as building it with today's tools. [1] "X" meaning "variable to be substituted for" rather than "company that made a bizarre naming choice for no apparent reason".
ffitch 3y ago
as a side note, I find it curious how back then technology innovations were largely ignored for years after they mature (over a decade for companies to start claiming domain names), and today technology is hyped even before it becomes practical (blockchain, llms)
caseyross 3y ago
While I agree with the spirit of the post, I think that there are better and worse times to start something new, and in retrospect 2014 seems like it was one of those worse times. The period from 2014--2024 was an era where the sheer gravity of the big tech platforms crushed out innovative startups left and right. People with an extreme focus on product polish could succeed, like Slack (est. 2013) and Discord (est. 2015), but it feels like most of the tech-sphere was either just working on half-hearted products towards an inevitable acqui-hire, or fervently trying to mainstream blockchain in a wishful attempt to create an entirely separate, more open ecosystem.
- manmal 3y ago
  You’re using past tense - has this period ended for you?
  - bbor 3y ago
    Well, a startup (ish…) is threatening Google, and VC money is much much tighter. So I’d say the Silicon Valley era is officially over. I hope y’all enjoyed it! I for one am a bit excited to see what’s the next big consumer idea to capture the zeitgeist.
    - tavavex 3y ago
      Wait, which startup could possibly be threatening the entirety of Google?
      - aerzen 3y ago
        maybe openai?
      - dazzlefruit 3y ago
        Arguably the entirety you need to threaten is Search and ads. Remove those, what happens to the rest?
      - bbor 3y ago
joshthecynic 3y ago
[dead]
downWidOutaFite 3y ago
This would be a lot more true if we could break up the trillion dollar tech monopolies. And we could do it if we would muster up the political will to do it. Step one is to stop idolizing the crony VCs and billionaires.
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
  or we could just break up companies involved in anti-competitive practices regardless of their size. you know, rule of law and stuff
  - fsflover 3y ago
    We should start with the large companies anyway. They make the most harm.
tomcam 3y ago
There are always opportunities, at least in the USA. I started programming in 1985 and thought I was very likely too late. I was the same age as Chris Espinosa, who was Apple's head of documentation at age 14. At that time it was still not perfectly clear that PCs would be regarded as essential to business. I had no one to talk to about computers and programming. I was in a very rough spot in my life and had to teach myself everything, while not being sure I'd have a job in 5 years. A decade later in 1996 I started at Microsoft, which virtually all of my peers thought had run its course. They were selling stock like crazy. By the time I left 4 years later the stock had gone up 1300%. Last I checked it's gone up yet another 2500% or so--I kept my 1,000 ESPP shares mostly out of nostalgia and thanks to a company that was so good to me. I bought a website after the first dot com bust of 2001, monetized it by hiring well, and it provided a very good living for well over two decades after that. This is an incredible time to start a web-based business because there's a surfeit of free and almost free tools for development all the way to deployment.
- up2isomorphism 3y ago
  Give an example in 1985 to show there are opportunities today is not convincing.
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    Older people cannot fathom this logic for some reason.
    - jachee 3y ago
      Fine. Give up. Don’t chase a dream. Just go find some drudgery for a paycheck. Don’t bother saving. You won’t need it. You never had a shot anyway. Your ideas are stupid. Any time you think of a thing, someone else has thought of it first. There’s no point in trying to make anything better. It’s all as good as it can possibly be. Such a perfect world doesn’t need your contribution; can’t be changed by the likes of you; won’t care, even if you do manage to come up with something novel. You’re too young to be taken seriously, and too late for everything, so why bother? So get out there and fulfill your failure, and don’t worry about dreaming. All the dreamers woke up ages ago.
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martynr 3y ago
Unlikely to be a popular question in this forum but in my view the most important topic we need to reflect on is “are we really better off with these services?” - obviously at face value there is utility or there wouldn’t be the market penetration but the externalities and issues of market dominance are becoming more apparent and pressing. And if we agree that better solutions are needed then the question becomes “how do we create the market conditions that support those better outcomes?” I’d really like to see kk reflect on this article with 10 years hindsight and see if he remains optimistic.
- marapuru 3y ago
  I was thinking something similar. Yes, a lot has happened. But which metric can we use to determine whether this was a successful decade?
hasoleju 3y ago
Most of the things that made up the internet in 2014 were created in the second half of the internets lifespan at that point in time. Assuming that this trend continues, most of the things people will use in 2044 still have to be invented. You don't now what the new things will be. But looking back we notice that a lot of things came into our lifes recently. We are so used to these big innovations that it feels like they have always been there.
tavavex 3y ago
I'm young, and talking about years like 1985 feels like talking about some other reality, but to me it still feels like the two years aren't comparable. Whenever I read about the history of computers and software in the 80s, it feels like there are always mentions of relatively new companies foraging their path, new hardware manufacturers and software developers shaping the brand new home computer industry. Sure, there were some old giants on the playing field, but it almost sounds like anyone with a decent idea could carve out a space for themselves. 2014 though? There were a bunch of opportunities back then, obviously, but it was already deep into the megacorp consolidation era, when large software or web companies owned dozens of unrelated services and had secured an almost endless influx of cash. There were startups, and a few of them became extremely successful, but it feels like most of them were either doomed to fail or be bought out by a larger company. I feel like in this last decade, internet innovation had mostly slowed - the internet of 2004 was extremely different from the internet of 2014, yet 10 more years passed since then and it doesn't feel like as much has changed. Maybe it's just my imaginary rose-tinted view of the past or something, but it feels like it's harder than ever for a startup to compete with the big players now. The only big exception I can think of is video games - self-publishing anything was probably almost impossible in the 80s, but nowadays we have an endless sea of development and publishing tools for independent developers with fresh new ideas. Perhaps, there's a completely new field on the horizon that will level the playing field once more, putting everyone back at square one. I think that some industries could get squeezed dry until the next big innovation comes along, or people move onto some other new space.
aizyuval 3y ago
History shows that there’s no such thing as late, as we are humans, there are always vacuum to fill if people take ownership for them. Rebels, inventors, thinkers, hackers. They all emerged in different times by taking ownership. It is only the perception of this innovation that could change as times go on.
jonplackett 3y ago
I like this. It reminds me of an anecdote Tony Robbins tells about a gold miner who just says, “The thing people don’t realised is there’s gold EVERYWHERE”
- defrost 3y ago
  The actual reality is that many places have so little gold that the cost of extraction is far greater than the value of the gold. You still have to watch your break even.
boffinAudio 3y ago
As someone who has used the Internet since 1985, I constantly find myself reminded of the fact that the Internet isn't just port 80. The Internet is so much more than just the web, and when someone comes up with a cross platform, powerful application which uses some other port and some other protocol, it will be just as functional on the Internet as any other Web Browser. We could just as easily produce clients which exchange Lua bytecode. In fact, we do (Games, etc.) .. but we could just as easily build an execution environment (which is what browsers are) that allows a much wider and broader range of application capabilities than the browser. This, then, is what I have in mind, when I think "I've been on the Internet too long, I've become jaded": actually, the browser is just the lowest common denominator. As soon as some other client application is built which pushes user experience beyond what the browser is capable, the Internet will still be there to host it. And I find that inspiring, even after 40 years of crud.
- TimTheTinker 3y ago
  > As soon as some other client application is built which pushes user experience beyond what the browser is capable The problem is that the browser is so good at being a ubiquitous, open-source, open-standards-based, cross-platform, near-instant-loading secure remote code execution environment. As Brendan Eich says, always bet on JS and WASM. I would extend that to -- always bet on browsers. With the amount of change that has occurred in browser technology over the last 30 years, I strongly think the future looks like more improvement in browser technology (and perhaps deprecation/removal of old standards) than an entirely new paradigm. I know various early web pioneers want to build a post-Web application delivery system (notably Tim Berners-Lee and Douglas Crockford), but given the accumulated legacy of modern browsers and web apps and the ongoing investments into browser technology, I don't see how any post-Web system could gain any traction within the next 25 years. But yes - your point still stands. If anything better than browsers ever appears, the internet will indeed still be there to host it.
  - BrendanEich 3y ago
    A couple of ways for a new "browser" to leapfrog: 1/ As guest in current browsers acting as hosts, for the zero-install ubiquity of the Web. This would require WebGPU, Wasm, fast JS<=>Wasm calls, and installable PWAs at least. Gatekeepers notably Apple can and will hinder. Once established, this new hosted app could be nativized to drop the browser dependency. 2/ As new obligate not facultative browser-like app in new device, e.g., XR eyewear. The device would have to take off at very large scale, and its maker(s) would want to do things not easily done via (1). The extant Web would be mapped onto in-world surfaces but the new device and its content stack would support things that go way beyond evolutionary improvements to the Web. I used to think (2) might happen with Oculus being acquired by Meta, or by Apple eyewear, but I'm less optimistic now. The Big Tech players, especially Apple, can build nice h/w, but it won't get to scale quickly enough to subsume the Web.
MichaelRo 3y ago
"Opportunities still exist" is not at odds with "the low hanging fruit has been picked". At the moment both statements above are true, meaning we (the little guy) are on average fucked. Sugar coating it with platitudes and cheap aphorisms doesn't change the reality that opportunities have dried out for all but the wealthy and connected and even for them it's not easy.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  The low-hanging fruit has been picked. But part of that fruit was producing better tools. So we now have taller ladders. As a result, there is new fruit that now is low-hanging.
murbard2 3y ago
Well sure, in 2014 you were not too late, but now...
i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
I'm pretty effective at my job (embedded software) and I have a decade of pretty solid experience writing device drivers and debugging some really tough issues. But I always feel like I'm not at all ready for the caliber expected on the US job market. I joined a startup so that I could be pushed harder and to prove to myself I can thrive in an environment where it is expected that you will put in 300% effort. Who knows maybe I'll give it a go in a couple of years.
- Draiken 3y ago
  You will likely learn this yourself, but having done this transition in the past, the image I had of this world was simply not real. Startups fake shit all the time, cut corners everywhere (even when they shouldn't) and the hustle culture exists primarily to benefit from employee overwork (free labor). Coming from a developing country I always thought I would never be as good as "first-world developers". The reality is that the bell curve applies the same way everywhere. Most people aren't exceptional and if you're exceptional in your country, you're most likely exceptional everywhere. If I were to give myself one advice in the past it would be: you're more than good enough. Of course, YMMV. Good luck either way mate!
  - i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
    Thanks brother. Big love! The thing about hustling is to only do it for yourself not others.
anymouse123456 3y ago
These conversations about "way back when" and attempting to compare tech opportunities from one time period to another, always seem to focus on the wild opportunities and forget about the equally insane constraints. Please don't forget that in the late nineties, CPUs were measured in a few hundred MHz, RAM in tens of MBs, and network speeds were kilobytes per second. FOSS was a new idea and most software cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. People PAID for compilers! Workstations cost many thousands and servers cost millions. These investments would be literally wiped out every year or two by the leading edge of Moore's law. In the late nineties, I worked for a company that charged $3 million to a big brand to build a website with user forums. It took a year and more than 30 people to launch. We had to buy ~$1m worth of server hardware and fasten it into racks. Every time constraints change, new opportunities emerge that either weren't possible or just didn't make sense before. If you're looking for opportunities, keep an eye on observable, recent changes, especially those that haven't yet been broadly distributed. Look for changes in constraints that are limiting large amounts of valuable activity. Some random examples in the last 5-10 years (IMO) are: - LLMs, obviously - Shared, cloud infrastructure made it trivially inexpensive to launch new business ideas - High speed computation has fallen in price so much that most applications don't even need cloud infrastructure anymore (IMO) - The amount of trust many people have in big tech companies is at a nadir, this could be a great time to carve out a beach head in anything they do. Being perceived as trustworthy and NOT THEM could be enough to build a great business. - Many people seem to feel that social media is net bad for us, figure out how to solve the same problem set (feeling engaged and connected?), with fewer negative trade offs. - The electronics hobby market has exploded and made new hardware ideas possible, even if budget is limited. There are a bunch of these kinds of observations that you're uniquely positioned to observe and dig deep on. Most of them aren't viable, but the fun is in probing around at the edges of what's possible and learning. That's the thing that brings us closer to whatever will work. Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed that when I'm waking up frustrated and unhappy most days, it has almost always been because I'm ignoring my conscience, which has been trying to tell me that I'm not pointed in the right direction.
warthog 3y ago
I think another consideration here is not the internet itself but its distribution. Internet economy is not an anarcho capitalist environment anymore where any opportunity is wide open. It is more restricted to big circles or ecosystems controlled by Big Tech. Take mobile and app stores. There are teams and people that build so many innovative and better solutions to deal with apps and app stores, yet they are simply not allowed. AI does not change this norm. VR and AR perhaps, but they are also dominated by the same companies. Web3 was a good bet to change it but seems like it is not happening, at least the way we thought it should happen. I am still optimistic about the future but possibilities are realistically rarer. Ref: Yanis Varoufakis also talks about this in context of a digital feudalistic society.
silent_cal 3y ago
An old coworker of mine had a friend who created an app for tugboat captains, and is now pulling over 200k a year from it (probably more now). There are opportunities, they're just not very "cool". Have to look in unusual places.
- ActionHank 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, what sort of functionality does a tugboat captain need that a regular boat\ship captain wouldn't?
  - silent_cal 3y ago
    I honestly have no idea, but I think his customers are mostly moving goods up and down the Mississippi River. So there's probably some specific needs there.
    - ActionHank 3y ago
      Tinder for tugboat captains confirmed!
      - silent_cal 3y ago
        Lol
    - bombcar 3y ago
      There's tons of "small money" (read, too small for a VC, quite comfortable for a single developer or small company) to be made helping to automate small businesses, especially things that are built on a lot of independent contractors. Some VC firm tried to do it for trucking and exploded recently, but there's still needs there that can be filled. The key is to fill slowly and grow; for an example (and completely guessing) you could have an app that starts out as just a "tugboat parking availability" or whatever, and then you find what the users using it would also like to see.
      - 3y ago
DrNosferatu 3y ago
The same freedom should apply to LLMs! Specially because, initially, the internet only provided content free of charge - now we actually pay subscriptions to use the top LLMs.
- adtac 3y ago
  The opposite is true too. Things that used to be expensive are abundant. An encyclopaedia would have cost you thousands of dollars, but you can use the greatest and most up to date compilation of human knowledge for free today (if you can deal with a few donation banners from the Wikimedia foundation around December every year).
emrah 3y ago
I had this revelation a while back as well. Imagine all the people getting born today, and they have some growing up to do. By the time they are ready to go out and do stuff, more time will pass. There is certainly nothing they can do about the timing of their birth and they will have to do the best they can. You can imagine being born today and it's even better than that because you are ready to take action already, right now!

313 points by yarapavan 3y ago

A few general observations: While there are still opportunities, perhaps fewer in developed and more in developing countries, the QUALITY of opportunities were different back in the days. The SOFTWARE field was still relatively wide open. The barrier-to-entry was being nerdy smart, but otherwise the costs (basic computers, telephone line access, some education) were low, at least in parts of the USA. Simultaneously the potential return was high. Because the information age was just beginning, and the world was hungry for software. People who were smart with software at that right time could literally shape the coming world. Think Microsoft and Google. In comparison, while the hardware side (chipsets, telecom equipment, etc) has grown, it hasn't "exploded", maybe except CPU or GPU, which are hugely capital intensive. You cannot train AI in your garage yet in a way that differentiates your "product" from that of the big players. The demand for pure software is no longer that high. On the hardware side, barriers to "physical" innovations, such as semiconductors, medicine, etc are still high now as ever. The "low" hanging "soft" fruits have been picked. This now feels more like the big mainframe computer era. So while there are still opportunities, they aren't comparable to the past. When science and technology fundamentally changed in the past, from manual labor to machinery to electronics etc, they opened up new fields for human innovation and endeavors. Groundbreaking disruptions are much rarer now, and the only one, AI, opens up a new field more for computers than for people.

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mysterydip 3y ago

A great reminder, and interestingly prescient given the AI growth in the past couple years.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Accurate I guess. Amazing given this was a decade ago! > Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. Personally the AI aspect feels like the least compelling aspect of how computing can build in-roads & become genuinely compelling to the world again. Many many many people are on the sprinkle-on-some-AI-and-get-rich path, but it's just incredibly non-contributive to the field, to expanding the frontier to me. Apply deep-learned expert-systems doesn't making computing better on iota, doesn't enhance man machine-symbiosis. I crave a computing era where we can return to the fundamentals. To me, computing's 90's/aughts boom was because we created a democratized access to all the tech, because OSS helped us all learn and grow together. We never had better leverage to augment intellect (the Douglas Engelbart vision/mission) than that, and that made all the difference. It's hard for me to imagine owned proprietary ML spawning lateral growth & understanding, to me.
- tomrod 3y ago
  > I crave a computing era where we can return to the fundamentals. The core of this comes down to -- will it scale? This is what I want to see from the OS/OW AI models (open source / open weights) universe (kudos to Hugging Face for facilitating this). I suspect the OpenAI model approach, where all infra is hidden and the models are hidden behind services, can't scale to meet the demand of what people want out of AI. Directions like Mamba over hungry compute Transformers, SLM as over expensive LLMs, and so on, will commodify AI services as operational frameworks mature. OpenAI gets that, hence why they are listening to consumer demand, but their moat assumption is faulty. That said, I am optimistic about the future of this technology and others that are currently being mined for breakthroughs.
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    I can see better now that this is a distinct take, but the fundamentals to me were about man-machine symbiosis. About making systems that we understand & can be freer for using. I do think scale is important too. But it's a refinement it feels like, one we've already covered pretty well albeit have to keep re-learning/isn't evenly distributed yet. But making computing that is open & explorable? Go watch an Alan Kay talk, any of them; he'll say what I'm saying: we barely have begun to figure out the actual essence of computing where it opens itself up to us & makes us more potent people. We have been grinding on the same target, without pause for thinking about what general computing systems could be like, and it's the wider view that this is all actually on service of, that will help us. AI to me is mostly creating our own Dark Forest scenario on our own planet that we have to somehow coexist with. More distraction from fundamentals.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

I have hope for many more turns / revolutions! Boy have we been in a holding/consolidation pattern. The age of massification has been upon us; getting everyone else online has been the effort, the way to rise. Free online services we can connect to from anywhere has been an amazing change, a totally new expectation that totally changes how computing situates itself in our lives. At much cost to figuring out further places to pioneer, I feel. We need new cycles with new energy, where lots of people are trying stuff out again. Computing & tech should not stay well settled; we should be trying crazy stuff. It feels like a lifetime ago that Tim O'Reilly was preaching "follow the alpha geeks", look for those very capable folks doing excellently for themselves. That ability to trendspot & try lots of things has been somewhat by these huge scales & systems, but I believe a return to personal-ity has to crop up again sometime. We'll find some fertile terrains where new things are a happening again. 2014 was when thing were actually really setting in place, when the pioneering stage was really giving way to some settlers (and town planners, see: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...). There's a lot of roughness, but tech getting it's mojo back may be not far off. It's a challenge though; the reality of creating ever-connected ever-online systems is hard. We have amazing amounts of server we can fit in a pizza box, at incredibly low $/performance, but we're unpracticed at doing it without pain at smaller scales, by ourselves, anew. Trying to create new generative platforms, that serve as a basis to let more value spring up: it needs a strong foundation, so that it can keep "creating more value than it captures," another O'Reilly-ism. The future is (with hope) exciting!

coffeebeqn 3y ago

They already figured out bronze that you can build anything you can imagine out of. Why would I put any more effort into metallurgy ?

amelius 3y ago
The other day I was trying to forge a lock but then the guy showed up who gave me the iron ore, asking for 30% of my revenue ...

JohnMakin 3y ago

This fun thought only holds true if the internet is not in decline. in 2014, which very arguably was peak internet, I could understand not thinking that, but today, I struggle to imagine how this isn’t the case.

datadrivenangel 3y ago
Peak internet was 2015, before the 2016 internet rupture when the digital space become pop culture and cyberspace inverted into the real.

WD-42 3y ago

Not to seem pessimistic, but in the 10 years since this article what have we really gained on the internet that we didn’t have then? Seems like we got a lot more social media and some failed promises from crypto. This is barring the current ai stuff since it’s still really shaking out.

muzani 3y ago
There was the mobile and cloud boom. Which resulted in more digital payments (more difficult for crime and corruption), online to offline stuff like ride sharing and e-commerce. Plus a ton of advancements on logistics, especially in developing countries. I think most of these changes didn't affect developed nations so much, it's probably still good old Walmart and Amazon. But they were lifechanging to developing nations. We had some advancements in the rights of factory workers as they had to match gig workers, and crime dropped drastically in some places because it just wasn't worth it anymore when you could climb out of poverty by delivering food.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  mobile and cloud was well alive and booming a decade before 2014 (i guess you could very technically argue not cloud but S3 buckets on aws caught fire almost instantaneously)
  - dasil003 3y ago
    S3 didn't launch until 2006, iPhone 2007, App Store 2008. In 2004 we had Palms and VPSs, but that doesn't quality as mobile and cloud in any modern sense of the word.
    - JohnMakin 3y ago
      so I’ll hope you’ll forgive me 2 years then on my “decade” statement which was not meant as literally as you took it. There were mobile phones before the iphone. Like a whole ecosystem even! They even had screens! and browsers! and internet! the major innovation the iphone brought was a touch screen (and a decent camera), which sort of existed, but nothing as smooth and crisp as the iphone. please i really hope people out there dont think the iphone was the invention of the cell phone.

dougmwne 3y ago

I feel like the last 10 years have been a maturing phase. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for young upstarts without funding. It seemed like it was the era of big money innovation, burning mountains of cash trying to stake the last few open claims on the app and web ecosystem. And there was the crypto stuff, yuck, many went to prison. But the real revolution is AI. Thinking back to 2014 and peering forward, it’s unfathomable. If there had been a sci-fi movie, I would have thought it unrealistic. I still think I have no idea where this will take is or how much our industry will change. What a great time to be an entrepreneur.

ildjarn 3y ago
Her came out in 2013, so there kind of was a movie.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  Oh that’s true. She was a most excellent chatbot. But I don’t recall her making images, movies or composing music. I recall that movie seemed cute but probably technologically impossible. Now it’s reality for many users of AI girlfriends.
  - ciroduran 3y ago
    In the movie she makes up the lyrics of a song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxahbnUCZxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxahbnUCZxY

DoreenMichele 3y ago

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today. I don't know why anyone would sit around moping about "If only this were thirty years ago!" If it seems like your idea would be "easy" or something -- if only it were thirty years ago -- then most likely it's because we are where we are and you know what you know now that you wouldn't have known then. It's like all the people who say things like "Youth is wasted on the young" and "I wish I had known what I know now back when I was seventeen." Yeah, you know it at all because you aren't seventeen.

santoshalper 3y ago
I do, because figuring out what is going to be big 30 years from now is hard (arguably impossible to do deterministically), but knowing what is big now is easy, and wishing you could go back and capitalize on that is natural.
- lostemptations5 3y ago
  But not useful-- so that's why planting the "tree" now is more practical
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  A lot of people also spend scads of time contemplating how they would spend the money if they won the lottery and it's generally a waste of time. They probably aren't going to win the lottery and it usually isn't used as a stepping stone to making real life decisions about, say, what kind of career they want to pursue or how they wish to spend their retirement. I used to do that sort of thing and then began going "If I value x, why sit around telling myself I can't possibly have that or some piece of that without winning the lottery? Why not do what I can to actually work towards that to some degree, in some fashion?" So you may get it. That's fine. I don't and that's not commentary on anyone but me and how my mind works.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
If this were thirty years ago instead of today, the opportunity to build X[1] would be wide open, but you'd have to build it with the tools that were available 30 years ago. That might not be nearly as easy as building it with today's tools. [1] "X" meaning "variable to be substituted for" rather than "company that made a bizarre naming choice for no apparent reason".

ffitch 3y ago

as a side note, I find it curious how back then technology innovations were largely ignored for years after they mature (over a decade for companies to start claiming domain names), and today technology is hyped even before it becomes practical (blockchain, llms)

caseyross 3y ago

While I agree with the spirit of the post, I think that there are better and worse times to start something new, and in retrospect 2014 seems like it was one of those worse times. The period from 2014--2024 was an era where the sheer gravity of the big tech platforms crushed out innovative startups left and right. People with an extreme focus on product polish could succeed, like Slack (est. 2013) and Discord (est. 2015), but it feels like most of the tech-sphere was either just working on half-hearted products towards an inevitable acqui-hire, or fervently trying to mainstream blockchain in a wishful attempt to create an entirely separate, more open ecosystem.

manmal 3y ago
You’re using past tense - has this period ended for you?
- bbor 3y ago
  Well, a startup (ish…) is threatening Google, and VC money is much much tighter. So I’d say the Silicon Valley era is officially over. I hope y’all enjoyed it! I for one am a bit excited to see what’s the next big consumer idea to capture the zeitgeist.
  - tavavex 3y ago
    Wait, which startup could possibly be threatening the entirety of Google?
    - aerzen 3y ago
      maybe openai?
    - dazzlefruit 3y ago
      Arguably the entirety you need to threaten is Search and ads. Remove those, what happens to the rest?
    - bbor 3y ago

joshthecynic 3y ago

[dead]

downWidOutaFite 3y ago

This would be a lot more true if we could break up the trillion dollar tech monopolies. And we could do it if we would muster up the political will to do it. Step one is to stop idolizing the crony VCs and billionaires.

iraqmtpizza 3y ago
or we could just break up companies involved in anti-competitive practices regardless of their size. you know, rule of law and stuff
- fsflover 3y ago
  We should start with the large companies anyway. They make the most harm.

tomcam 3y ago

There are always opportunities, at least in the USA. I started programming in 1985 and thought I was very likely too late. I was the same age as Chris Espinosa, who was Apple's head of documentation at age 14. At that time it was still not perfectly clear that PCs would be regarded as essential to business. I had no one to talk to about computers and programming. I was in a very rough spot in my life and had to teach myself everything, while not being sure I'd have a job in 5 years. A decade later in 1996 I started at Microsoft, which virtually all of my peers thought had run its course. They were selling stock like crazy. By the time I left 4 years later the stock had gone up 1300%. Last I checked it's gone up yet another 2500% or so--I kept my 1,000 ESPP shares mostly out of nostalgia and thanks to a company that was so good to me. I bought a website after the first dot com bust of 2001, monetized it by hiring well, and it provided a very good living for well over two decades after that. This is an incredible time to start a web-based business because there's a surfeit of free and almost free tools for development all the way to deployment.

up2isomorphism 3y ago
Give an example in 1985 to show there are opportunities today is not convincing.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Older people cannot fathom this logic for some reason.
  - jachee 3y ago
    Fine. Give up. Don’t chase a dream. Just go find some drudgery for a paycheck. Don’t bother saving. You won’t need it. You never had a shot anyway. Your ideas are stupid. Any time you think of a thing, someone else has thought of it first. There’s no point in trying to make anything better. It’s all as good as it can possibly be. Such a perfect world doesn’t need your contribution; can’t be changed by the likes of you; won’t care, even if you do manage to come up with something novel. You’re too young to be taken seriously, and too late for everything, so why bother? So get out there and fulfill your failure, and don’t worry about dreaming. All the dreamers woke up ages ago.

deleted 3y ago

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martynr 3y ago

Unlikely to be a popular question in this forum but in my view the most important topic we need to reflect on is “are we really better off with these services?” - obviously at face value there is utility or there wouldn’t be the market penetration but the externalities and issues of market dominance are becoming more apparent and pressing. And if we agree that better solutions are needed then the question becomes “how do we create the market conditions that support those better outcomes?” I’d really like to see kk reflect on this article with 10 years hindsight and see if he remains optimistic.

marapuru 3y ago
I was thinking something similar. Yes, a lot has happened. But which metric can we use to determine whether this was a successful decade?

hasoleju 3y ago

Most of the things that made up the internet in 2014 were created in the second half of the internets lifespan at that point in time. Assuming that this trend continues, most of the things people will use in 2044 still have to be invented. You don't now what the new things will be. But looking back we notice that a lot of things came into our lifes recently. We are so used to these big innovations that it feels like they have always been there.

tavavex 3y ago

I'm young, and talking about years like 1985 feels like talking about some other reality, but to me it still feels like the two years aren't comparable. Whenever I read about the history of computers and software in the 80s, it feels like there are always mentions of relatively new companies foraging their path, new hardware manufacturers and software developers shaping the brand new home computer industry. Sure, there were some old giants on the playing field, but it almost sounds like anyone with a decent idea could carve out a space for themselves. 2014 though? There were a bunch of opportunities back then, obviously, but it was already deep into the megacorp consolidation era, when large software or web companies owned dozens of unrelated services and had secured an almost endless influx of cash. There were startups, and a few of them became extremely successful, but it feels like most of them were either doomed to fail or be bought out by a larger company. I feel like in this last decade, internet innovation had mostly slowed - the internet of 2004 was extremely different from the internet of 2014, yet 10 more years passed since then and it doesn't feel like as much has changed. Maybe it's just my imaginary rose-tinted view of the past or something, but it feels like it's harder than ever for a startup to compete with the big players now. The only big exception I can think of is video games - self-publishing anything was probably almost impossible in the 80s, but nowadays we have an endless sea of development and publishing tools for independent developers with fresh new ideas. Perhaps, there's a completely new field on the horizon that will level the playing field once more, putting everyone back at square one. I think that some industries could get squeezed dry until the next big innovation comes along, or people move onto some other new space.

aizyuval 3y ago

History shows that there’s no such thing as late, as we are humans, there are always vacuum to fill if people take ownership for them. Rebels, inventors, thinkers, hackers. They all emerged in different times by taking ownership. It is only the perception of this innovation that could change as times go on.

jonplackett 3y ago

I like this. It reminds me of an anecdote Tony Robbins tells about a gold miner who just says, “The thing people don’t realised is there’s gold EVERYWHERE”

defrost 3y ago
The actual reality is that many places have so little gold that the cost of extraction is far greater than the value of the gold. You still have to watch your break even.

boffinAudio 3y ago

As someone who has used the Internet since 1985, I constantly find myself reminded of the fact that the Internet isn't just port 80. The Internet is so much more than just the web, and when someone comes up with a cross platform, powerful application which uses some other port and some other protocol, it will be just as functional on the Internet as any other Web Browser. We could just as easily produce clients which exchange Lua bytecode. In fact, we do (Games, etc.) .. but we could just as easily build an execution environment (which is what browsers are) that allows a much wider and broader range of application capabilities than the browser. This, then, is what I have in mind, when I think "I've been on the Internet too long, I've become jaded": actually, the browser is just the lowest common denominator. As soon as some other client application is built which pushes user experience beyond what the browser is capable, the Internet will still be there to host it. And I find that inspiring, even after 40 years of crud.

TimTheTinker 3y ago
> As soon as some other client application is built which pushes user experience beyond what the browser is capable The problem is that the browser is so good at being a ubiquitous, open-source, open-standards-based, cross-platform, near-instant-loading secure remote code execution environment. As Brendan Eich says, always bet on JS and WASM. I would extend that to -- always bet on browsers. With the amount of change that has occurred in browser technology over the last 30 years, I strongly think the future looks like more improvement in browser technology (and perhaps deprecation/removal of old standards) than an entirely new paradigm. I know various early web pioneers want to build a post-Web application delivery system (notably Tim Berners-Lee and Douglas Crockford), but given the accumulated legacy of modern browsers and web apps and the ongoing investments into browser technology, I don't see how any post-Web system could gain any traction within the next 25 years. But yes - your point still stands. If anything better than browsers ever appears, the internet will indeed still be there to host it.
- BrendanEich 3y ago
  A couple of ways for a new "browser" to leapfrog: 1/ As guest in current browsers acting as hosts, for the zero-install ubiquity of the Web. This would require WebGPU, Wasm, fast JS<=>Wasm calls, and installable PWAs at least. Gatekeepers notably Apple can and will hinder. Once established, this new hosted app could be nativized to drop the browser dependency. 2/ As new obligate not facultative browser-like app in new device, e.g., XR eyewear. The device would have to take off at very large scale, and its maker(s) would want to do things not easily done via (1). The extant Web would be mapped onto in-world surfaces but the new device and its content stack would support things that go way beyond evolutionary improvements to the Web. I used to think (2) might happen with Oculus being acquired by Meta, or by Apple eyewear, but I'm less optimistic now. The Big Tech players, especially Apple, can build nice h/w, but it won't get to scale quickly enough to subsume the Web.

MichaelRo 3y ago

"Opportunities still exist" is not at odds with "the low hanging fruit has been picked". At the moment both statements above are true, meaning we (the little guy) are on average fucked. Sugar coating it with platitudes and cheap aphorisms doesn't change the reality that opportunities have dried out for all but the wealthy and connected and even for them it's not easy.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
The low-hanging fruit has been picked. But part of that fruit was producing better tools. So we now have taller ladders. As a result, there is new fruit that now is low-hanging.

murbard2 3y ago

Well sure, in 2014 you were not too late, but now...

i_am_a_peasant 3y ago

I'm pretty effective at my job (embedded software) and I have a decade of pretty solid experience writing device drivers and debugging some really tough issues. But I always feel like I'm not at all ready for the caliber expected on the US job market. I joined a startup so that I could be pushed harder and to prove to myself I can thrive in an environment where it is expected that you will put in 300% effort. Who knows maybe I'll give it a go in a couple of years.

Draiken 3y ago
You will likely learn this yourself, but having done this transition in the past, the image I had of this world was simply not real. Startups fake shit all the time, cut corners everywhere (even when they shouldn't) and the hustle culture exists primarily to benefit from employee overwork (free labor). Coming from a developing country I always thought I would never be as good as "first-world developers". The reality is that the bell curve applies the same way everywhere. Most people aren't exceptional and if you're exceptional in your country, you're most likely exceptional everywhere. If I were to give myself one advice in the past it would be: you're more than good enough. Of course, YMMV. Good luck either way mate!
- i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
  Thanks brother. Big love! The thing about hustling is to only do it for yourself not others.

anymouse123456 3y ago

These conversations about "way back when" and attempting to compare tech opportunities from one time period to another, always seem to focus on the wild opportunities and forget about the equally insane constraints. Please don't forget that in the late nineties, CPUs were measured in a few hundred MHz, RAM in tens of MBs, and network speeds were kilobytes per second. FOSS was a new idea and most software cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. People PAID for compilers! Workstations cost many thousands and servers cost millions. These investments would be literally wiped out every year or two by the leading edge of Moore's law. In the late nineties, I worked for a company that charged $3 million to a big brand to build a website with user forums. It took a year and more than 30 people to launch. We had to buy ~$1m worth of server hardware and fasten it into racks. Every time constraints change, new opportunities emerge that either weren't possible or just didn't make sense before. If you're looking for opportunities, keep an eye on observable, recent changes, especially those that haven't yet been broadly distributed. Look for changes in constraints that are limiting large amounts of valuable activity. Some random examples in the last 5-10 years (IMO) are: - LLMs, obviously - Shared, cloud infrastructure made it trivially inexpensive to launch new business ideas - High speed computation has fallen in price so much that most applications don't even need cloud infrastructure anymore (IMO) - The amount of trust many people have in big tech companies is at a nadir, this could be a great time to carve out a beach head in anything they do. Being perceived as trustworthy and NOT THEM could be enough to build a great business. - Many people seem to feel that social media is net bad for us, figure out how to solve the same problem set (feeling engaged and connected?), with fewer negative trade offs. - The electronics hobby market has exploded and made new hardware ideas possible, even if budget is limited. There are a bunch of these kinds of observations that you're uniquely positioned to observe and dig deep on. Most of them aren't viable, but the fun is in probing around at the edges of what's possible and learning. That's the thing that brings us closer to whatever will work. Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed that when I'm waking up frustrated and unhappy most days, it has almost always been because I'm ignoring my conscience, which has been trying to tell me that I'm not pointed in the right direction.

warthog 3y ago

I think another consideration here is not the internet itself but its distribution. Internet economy is not an anarcho capitalist environment anymore where any opportunity is wide open. It is more restricted to big circles or ecosystems controlled by Big Tech. Take mobile and app stores. There are teams and people that build so many innovative and better solutions to deal with apps and app stores, yet they are simply not allowed. AI does not change this norm. VR and AR perhaps, but they are also dominated by the same companies. Web3 was a good bet to change it but seems like it is not happening, at least the way we thought it should happen. I am still optimistic about the future but possibilities are realistically rarer. Ref: Yanis Varoufakis also talks about this in context of a digital feudalistic society.

silent_cal 3y ago

An old coworker of mine had a friend who created an app for tugboat captains, and is now pulling over 200k a year from it (probably more now). There are opportunities, they're just not very "cool". Have to look in unusual places.

ActionHank 3y ago
Out of curiosity, what sort of functionality does a tugboat captain need that a regular boat\ship captain wouldn't?
- silent_cal 3y ago
  I honestly have no idea, but I think his customers are mostly moving goods up and down the Mississippi River. So there's probably some specific needs there.
  - ActionHank 3y ago
    Tinder for tugboat captains confirmed!
    - silent_cal 3y ago
      Lol
  - bombcar 3y ago
    There's tons of "small money" (read, too small for a VC, quite comfortable for a single developer or small company) to be made helping to automate small businesses, especially things that are built on a lot of independent contractors. Some VC firm tried to do it for trucking and exploded recently, but there's still needs there that can be filled. The key is to fill slowly and grow; for an example (and completely guessing) you could have an app that starts out as just a "tugboat parking availability" or whatever, and then you find what the users using it would also like to see.
    - 3y ago

DrNosferatu 3y ago

The same freedom should apply to LLMs! Specially because, initially, the internet only provided content free of charge - now we actually pay subscriptions to use the top LLMs.

adtac 3y ago
The opposite is true too. Things that used to be expensive are abundant. An encyclopaedia would have cost you thousands of dollars, but you can use the greatest and most up to date compilation of human knowledge for free today (if you can deal with a few donation banners from the Wikimedia foundation around December every year).

emrah 3y ago

I had this revelation a while back as well. Imagine all the people getting born today, and they have some growing up to do. By the time they are ready to go out and do stuff, more time will pass. There is certainly nothing they can do about the timing of their birth and they will have to do the best they can. You can imagine being born today and it's even better than that because you are ready to take action already, right now!